The magnitude 8.7 asteroid (2) Pallas will occult the magnitude 9.3 star HD 142226 in the constellation Serpens, at 04:24 UT, 4th April, 2010.The 32.6 second event is only visible from the Pacific Ocean.

The Hubble telescope has provided new insight on 2 Pallas, one of the largest asteroids in the Solar System.The nearly 600km-wide rock is an example of an object that started out on the process of becoming a planet but never grew up into the real thing.Researchers have published a 3D model of the grapefruit-shaped mini-world in Science magazine.

Britney E. Schmidt, a UCLA doctoral student in the department of Earth and space sciences, wasn't sure what she'd glean from images of the asteroid Pallas taken by the Hubble Space Telescope. But she hoped to settle at least one burning question: Was Pallas, the second-largest asteroid, actually in that grey area between an asteroid and a small planet? The answer, she found, was yes. Pallas, like its sister asteroids Ceres and Vesta, was that rare thing: an intact protoplanet.

Images from the Hubble Space Telescope suggest that the asteroid Pallas should be grouped along with two other big space rocks as protoplanets - "planetary embryos" that were big enough to stay pretty much as they were during the formation of the solar system, but too small to progress to the next stage of development.Source

Astronomers examining one of the solar system's largest asteroids with the Hubble Space Telescope have dubbed it a "protoplanet."Pallas, an asteroid 265 kilometres in diameter and located in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, joins two other asteroids, Ceres and Vesta, which are also considered protoplanets.Read more

Images of Pallas from the Hubble Space TelescopeThese two sets of images were taken through different filters on the Hubble Space Telescope's Wide Field and Planetary Camera 2: an ultraviolet filter (top) and blue filter (bottom). They cover most of a rotation of Pallas, and reveal that it has an irregular shape and probably has some patchy albedo variations. In these images, we are looking at the southern hemisphere of Pallas, with the images centered at about 30 degrees south.

2 Pallas (Greek ) is an asteroid located in the asteroid belt region of the solar system and was the second to be discovered. It was found and named by astronomer Heinrich Wilhelm Matthäus Olbers on March 28, 1802.